mindslight

Given how each tractor manufacturer is essentially associated with its own specific country, I'd say this industry is a great example of how mature industries tend to consolidate into monopolies while getting propped up by regulatory capture greased by concerns over natural security. So while the regulatory costs you cite may indeed be onerous, simplistic calls merely for "less regulation" don't bear out.

> I’m not a mechanic or a farmer

So the author is looking at one third of the problem (from the perspective of an IT worker), in a comfortable stage-managed experience put on by Deere themselves. A sensor with a disconnected cable - a five minute visual inspection would have also diagnosed the problem!

I'm quite comfortable with computers. And yet when working on my own vehicles, anything that mentions "use the manufacturer software" is avoided unless it's impossible not to. For example my experience using Honda HDS:

1. Spend hours installing Windows in a VM, HDS software from dodgy forums (to avoid the even dodgier "cloud" offering), running an ethernet cable 75 feet outside to where I was working - when my goal was to have my hands dirty fixing the car.

2. Massively slow scan times. We're talking 20 minutes sitting there initializing its understanding of the bus by probing every device every time the software starts up. The software starts up a lot because every time it hits some unexpected condition it needs to be restarted. Every time you choose a different option to check something about another subsystem, the software needs to be restarted. Every time you need to check if you've made a permanent or temporary change, it needs to be restarted. Every time you actually get your hands dirty and make some change on the car, it needs to be restarted. And so on. Companies view these tools as pure cost centers, making it so embedded developers DGAF about any kind of robustness or polish.

3. No actual description of what can be set, or theories of operation of any hardware device. The best you get is references from procedures in service manuals designed to be blindly followed, and the corresponding button in the software that runs some black box procedure.

4. Along with that, the chance of touching a lot of things you don't really want to be touching! HDS made me reenter the VIN number every time it started up (which remember, is often), and I think this was actually writing the VIN number somewhere! I entered it wrong once and it appeared that I had actually changed something.

Now obviously Deere is not Honda, but I don't see a reason to expect this would be any better. And of course this is not even touching:

> Prices start at an annual cost of $195 per individual machine

All this overhead adds up when you're working on one or two vehicles in a personal-bespoke capacity. I'm never going to reach for that software again unless I absolutely have to, even though I know in theory it can tell me a lot in one central place. I'd rather simply model a vehicle's computers as black boxes. I'm sure if you're a Honda tech you develop a model of how the software works, what steps of the procedures to batch and when to pause and check things over, etc. But from an individual perspective where I've got one car to fix rather than one every day? It's utter trash.

Adding digital control networks to vehicles increases their inherent complexity. This is unavoidable, similar to adding any new system (eg ABS, 4WD, emissions controls themselves, etc). I think mechanics could respect that, if it weren't bundled with a whole bunch of unnecessary/accidental complexity including top-down surveillance/control. Knowing a thing or two about technology and engineering, what would I actually expect?

1. PDF documentation with thorough bus diagrams. For every node on the bus, documentation from its manufacturer - its theory of operation, the settings it has, the messages it reads from and reports to the bus, additional message/register definitions for what can be read by diagnostic tools. Everything that you'd get if these were DIP switches and LEDs rather than CAN messages.

2. Machine-readable descriptions of CAN PDUs published by the manufacturer themselves. All the message/register/etc definitions documented in the above files, in a well-defined format ready for use by third party tooling.

3. Third party libre software with the usual `make && make install` install path (ie easily incorporated into every operating environment) that uses those definitions to display bus messages in symbolic form, as well as craft new messages to tickle device functionality.

I think that about covers it - there isn't actually much here, it just needs to be documented! I know interacting with digital vehicle networks would still be frustrating for many, but people would eventually get over it and even embrace it - it should be more convenient to have the computers display what they're reading rather than having to work around them. Checking the computers first would become standard procedure if the tooling weren't so infuriating.

(For more context my own tractor is a Kubota with HP under the Tier IV threshold. I earnestly wish it did have a DPF - less shit to breathe in and less black crap coating my loader. But not at the cost of dealing with the current "state of the art" computer controls! I've also heard horror stories about long term Deere parts availability)

My question is not whether those who voted for Trump 2024 are going to come to their senses and sour on this incompetent, destructive, and corrupt con man. My question is how long their reality checks are going to last before they start leaning right back into the revanchist destructionist feel-good narratives that led us here in the first place. This senseless destruction would not have happened if they had merely listened to their fellow citizens rather than writing us all off as some caricatures of woke boosters as their media propagandists led them to. Was Trump 2024 a true enough instantiation of what they've been demanding that they can finally put their hopeless "lost cause" bullshit to bed? Or are its eminently predictable results only going to remain obvious long enough for another temporary reprieve?

Your understanding of LLCs is a bit off. The LLC (or other corporate) structure does not protect the nurse from liability, nor any of the other directly-involved workers. The LLC protects the owners of the LLC - ie the ones turning the screws that spread workers ever-more thin. Workers generally avoid being sued mostly by custom, following procedures set by the LLC and/or professional bodies, being "judgement proof" (ie not having significant assets), and various types of insurances.

("Replace AI with 'company' and you realize that we're living in that world already." I 100% agree with this, though!)

It's understandable when you see that the ethos is to have software that represents the user in charge of the rendering, rather than centralizing it all on the server. There is a major difference between common "app store apps" or hostile javascript bundled with websites, versus software that's been written to work in the user's interest. However as they use similar delivery methods, it's understandable that it takes a minute to think through and revisit your assumptions that have lead to being default anti- javascript or app.

> too much time being the "defund the police/eat the rich" sidekick to Biden

It seems like you're merely demonstrating one dynamic by which people are able to maintain that proud ignorance - buying into simplistic feel good narratives about the "other side" which swamp their reasoning capabilities, absolving them of responsibility for their decision. This is a large part of being "fully steeped in propaganda".

For the actual reality, Harris was a public prosecutor - essentially a police officer's best friend. Neither Biden nor Harris were looking to destroy the federal government. More than anything, they represented the status quo rather than this nonsense you're repeating about "defund the police/eat the rich".

I'm a libertarian who hadn't voted for a major party in a national election until 2020. I had to come to terms with getting older, more conservative, and having to holding my nose and voting for the corpo status quo. But it was the reasonable, responsible choice. I can most certainly understand people who stayed home or voted third party. But voting for the known quantity destructionist and rationalizing it with nonsense propaganda is exactly what I was talking about.

There might be an argument to be made that your argument could be used to placate the rest of the world if we manage to turn the ship around but without Constitutional reforms that would keep the destructionists from gaining power again - "we were tricked" may work yet again. But as far as the actual question, no, people who voted for Grump in 2024 should not be allowed to look away or disown the horrible mistake they chose to make. It is in fact a necessary part of any reconciliation process.

Actual terrorists have a right to speak too, you know. Intrinsic to the whole idea of rights is that even people we don't like (or are even mortally opposed to!) still have them. The problem with "firebombs on anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers" is obviously the firebombs.

> Most Americans clearly don't approve

Except they did. Votes for Grump in 2016 were completely understandable, sympathizable even. Responsibility for the train wreck of a first term didn't fall at the feet of the voters - it's explainable by one politician being an utter shitbag once in office. And for the most part our institutions did function to contain most of the (direct) damage.

But Grump 2024 was a known quantity. The votes in 2024 demonstrate that the average American is either proudly ignorant of the actual policies they're choosing (ie fully steeped in propaganda that hides/downplays the destruction), or actively malicious towards the rest of the world (while benefiting from a privileged international position). Neither one bodes well for future decisions, even if there is some political will to pull up from the current autocratic destruction.

And no, the "we didn't know how bad he was going to be" of a 33% approval rating doesn't make up for that. Grump was a known quantity for this election, and the only way someone could have "not known" is by actively rejecting listening to their fellow citizens. Which goes right back to willful ignorance.

No, that's proxying the service. Presumably if your younger brother had asked you to buy ten handles of pure grain alcohol, you would have asked some questions.

Proxying the credential means something like letting your brother use your ID. But note there are still avenues of accountability here - for your brother if he would have gotten caught, and possibly for you for loaning him your ID.

These dynamics don't translate to Internet scale, where all it takes is literally one person to go "I disagree with this age check scheme on principle, and I will proxy my credential to anyone who asks".

At any rate, you had started off saying you didn't understand why there was criticism and now you know why, regardless of whether you accept that criticism.

Move over mahi-mahi, here comes maha tuna.

De/centralization is not an either or, but more like a yin and yang. There are aspects of IP that are highly centralized.

1. Assignment of addresses is centralized. Even though it's federated (ie distributed), authority still flows logically from one single authoritative view. And even though individual networks can choose to go against that central view, diverging too much prevents them from talking to one another (ie most of the bargaining is on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, rather than something more nimble or adaptive)

2. It's a protocol for communication between nodes. Reusing node addresses as service/contents addresses leads to services being inherently centralized on those (logical) nodes. Not a problem with IP itself, but definitely an attractive nuisance that made problems for things naively layered on top of IP like HTTP(S) and DNS.

(Sorry for the delay in replying. There is definitely an analog of Gresham's law for discussions)

I completely agree about the feedback loops. They're mutual feedback loops though, and causality can go both ways. We're currently stuck with a strong attractor of surveillance-based software. It's certainly possible to escape from the local minimum, but requires a lot of activation energy to escape it (compelling functionality, features, ease of use, etc, to prime its own network effects).

I don't think it was ads per se, but rather the centralizing software architecture of AJAX (et al). Everyone wanted to build things that were "easy" for "everyone" to use, how to make money came later. Or going back even earlier, if "the web" had been designed around something like content centric networking rather than HTTP.

On "tech moment right now is ripe for it" - for me, it has felt this way for the past twenty five years! I generally agree about pessimism as well, so let's just say at this point I'm tired. I certainly don't want to dissuade you from pouring new energy into software that is going to change the world [for the better]. But I'm also cautioning you to not reject other angles of reform!

Further on the pessimism point, isn't shying away from government (ie collective) action itself a form of pessimism? I'm pretty pessimistic about groups (herds) of people in general (things always end up going "sideways" due to opportunists). But looking at the structure of US politics it seems there is a large contingent of "government can never work" that ends up running interference whenever de jure government tries to reign in the corpos (which tend to act as de facto government), creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or putting my general point another way, in terms of the culture point you made elsewhere - our mass culture is currently strongly steeped in centralized political action/narratives. If you want our mass culture to change to value technical decentralization and privacy, then one of the main things you'd expect to manifest itself is a call for centralized/government action, ala privacy regulation, right? We can certainly lament the centralized political culture, but unless you're talking about changing two aspects of our culture simultaneously, then that basically is what it is.

> I don't know why HN rails against it [ZKP for age verification] constantly

Because on its own as often presented, it still has the glaring shortcoming that anybody can proxy an ID verification for anybody else without any form of accountability for having done so. Which means that the only way for it to actually be secure is for the implementation to also required locked down computing devices. Hence why the EU scheme insists on proprietary Apple/Google devices, and why Google research has written nerd sniping blog posts to market it.

There, now you know!

> I don't believe government regulation is the answer

While I agree with where you're coming from in spirit, if you want to push this then you've got to do the work of actually coming up with workable concrete approaches rather than hand waving against a whole general category of action. The problem is that digital communications lend themselves to centralized power, and power vacuums inevitably get filed by something, right?

I too would love to see the power of surveillance companies get magically reduced by something that isn't centralized government action. But that hasn't happened so far, right? If anything, they've grown stronger - sucked in ever more of our lives, sucked in technical communities who were culturally predisposed to and capable of resisting, and even taken over control of parts of the de jure government!

So barring that, government regulation (ie democratic accountability) seems like a necessary approach. This fails too of course (eg how all the natural rights referenced in the Bill of Rights are being infringed in one way or another). But once again what is the alternative to attempting to codify lofty ideals, writing them down, and then pushing to implement them wherever they're being infringed? Regulation like the GDPR and other EU directives at least attempt to draft rights-based paradigms, as imperfect as their implementation and enforcement may be.

The real problem would seem to be that we're soured on the idea of having reasonable laws in the US from every attempt at meaningful regulation ending up with a multitude of holes in it due to corporate lobbying. It seems like that is what needs to be focused on and addressed - thinking one can let the corpos run wild and then somehow outrun or individualistically push back on them is a pipe dream.

It seems like you should probably spend some effort on trying to learn at least a few more things?

It's disingenuous to invert the issue. It's not some matter of "don't like", but rather defaulting to not believing a habitually lying con artist. That is the smart thing to do, right? The real question is why so many people insist that everyone needs to continue trying to steelman his lying-by-induced-confabulation. I'm sure he did say something that backs up what you're saying. I'm also sure he also said a lot of things that directly contradict it.

Yeah, it's much better to be standing so you can toss the bag of food into the subway car right before the doors close.

The whole point of the label "smart" is to fill in vague positive thoughts for the customary "..." that comes right before "profit" in the standard /. business plan. And the real problem is that it works.

The big problem is that there has been, and is still, basically no political will in the US for GDPR-style privacy rights [0]. The current ID systems (DL# and SSN#) are already being flagrantly abused by an unaccountable surveillance industry, which backhauls every bit of data it can get away with, maintaining comprehensive dossiers on each of us. So until this is actually reigned in, then every bit of friction here actually helps as it prevents even more businesses from routinely demanding ID.

[0] due to constant undermining by said surveillance industry, which has now basically become "too big to fail"

That explains how he got the votes on election night in 2016. A vote for Grump in 2016 was completely understandable. But he should have plainly been a one term president, after his abjectly terrible handling of Covid (for starters, we needed leadership rather than dividership). But unfortunately in our upside-down world, Covid actually handed Grump a big excuse for why his first term was such an exercise in failure. And if there is one thing Grump is good at, it's weaseling responsibility onto others - a quality that his followers greatly admire as it soothes their own consciences as well.

It's also abusive for Amazon to delay your order for a week with their Super Spiteful Shipping, pushing you to sign up for their sunk cost fallacy subscription. When I'm in the middle of some project, I've got no qualms about ordering 2 or 3 different types of some part I need to hedge. I've been burned too many times with ordering only one type, having it have a problem, and then having to wait again. Constant games with prices is another one that induces orders from me that are destined to be returned. When a price drops significantly, the times I've asked customer service about having the price adjusted they tell me to just return and rebuy (hoping I'll be too lazy), so that's what I do. It's abuse all around, I'm not going to put moral weight on my own shoulders while the amoral company has no such burden.

It feels like we need to tweak the analogy for the surveillance industry. Something more like if all of your friends are pushing people off a cliff...

Yes I am talking with a US perspective. I would hope the GDPR would prevent such things in (most of) Europe. But I also personally wouldn't assume so given that there are still the same dynamics of keeping the info flows private to avoid scrutiny, and claiming plausible "legitimate purposes" and "consent".

That's the application software side. I would assume the IMEI and IMSI are both going out to the cell network though, and I would presume that it's trivial to tie a phone number to those with how the mobile industry generally sells subscriber data to various data brokers. The only question is how permissive those data brokers are (their major constraint is how much most people become aware of this dynamic), but when dealing with a major APT like Google I'd assume they're tuned into the best ones with songs about bona fide purposes.

What we actually need to do are things like ranked pairs voting, a recall election dynamic for president/congress/judges, constitutional amendment to enshrine splitting executive power into agencies with heads elected separately from the president, get rid of the electoral college, take out the supplicating trash from the Supreme Council, criminal trials and unjust enrichment clawbacks, and so on. The whole point of the names are to be stupid petty distractions, don't let yourself be distracted.

But the monthly subscription isn't that expensive?

(demon rises up. "muahahaha, you don't pay here with money")

We need a society-wide rude awakening to the terrible realities of these attractive nuisances pushed by the tech^wsurveillance industry. People get lured into using insecure garbage software because "works for me" and "everyone else is doing it", completely oblivious to the fact that party to every interaction is an uninvited guest.

When things like this happen, it puts the products' deliberate security vulnerabilities (and in this case, outright hostility) in stark relief. But then people think "I wouldn't be that stupid" or "what can I even do about it" as they go right back to continue relying on these products.

It's certainly understandable how we all have to compromise and suffer insecure systems simply in order to get things done, especially when interfacing with strangers. But for our most intimate communications and personal relationships, we should insist on secure software! This wouldn't have happened with Matrix, this wouldn't have happened with XMPP, this wouldn't have even happened with Signal. And to that reflexive thought of "that takes too much time and effort, especially for non-techies" - I'm pretty sure the person in the article sure wishes she had spend that effort now!

> We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.

I fully agree here! Although I think it's too kind to characterize it as "compliance". Once you get past the sheer incompetent and histrionic theatrics, this seems to be the primary goal behind the backers of Grumpism - keep destroying what's left of the US government so they can keep on expanding the scope of unaccountable corporate government based on unilaterally-set "policies".

Yes, that would be one way to do it - split up their power so they don't have coercive power to infringe upon our natural rights. A proper approach to anti-trust enforcement is another issue I've thought about for a while. We shouldn't focus on market cap, number of users, or the number of products. What needs to happen is declaring that hardware, software, and services all independent markets and prohibiting tying between them - strike the root of their capturing Metcalfe's law and other sticky market effects. In other words - Google can continue to run GMail-the-service at the scale they do, but all the clients (even those delivered as JS over HTTPS) need to be implemented with only publicly-available APIs - a clean divide between the developers of GMail-the-service and GMail-the-client with no internal documentation or communication - API change notification that goes out publicly to the developers of all clients. And of course with email, anticompetitive actions for sending email to GMail-the-service need to be reigned in as well.

> Corporations are extensions of the government?

Yes, every US-domestic corporation has been chartered by a state government. Every corporation that operates in the US has gotten a license from each state it operates in. Corporations (/LLCs) aren't just mere groups of people, rather they have a government-created liability shield.

> the reality is tentacles of influence going in both directions.

I completely agree with this as well. Which is why when taking them to task we need to not stop at the line of "independent entities", where they can comfortably retreat to and regroup until the political time is ripe. For example one of the hopeful approaches to reforming Citizens United involves changing state laws to constrain what chartered/licensed corpos can do.